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The retail and consumer goods industry faces considerable challenges, threatened by a demand for personalisation, an unoptimised business process constrained by human error and an inability to fully anticipate customer demands. These problems leave consumers unfulfilled in the search for an experience that reflects their continually developing desires.

Then you have technology, which presents both a challenge and the key solution to facing these challenges. With the ever-growing speed of innovation it has become increasingly important to constantly remain up to date with the latest possibilities for upgrading your company. The Retail Academy and PwC have identified two key technologies that will be essential to taking your business to the next level, these being Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

In this white paper we demonstrate viablepossibilitiesthat are applicable today for both technologies, specifically in the retail and consumer goods industry. For AI we highlight various cases of how AI has been applied and explain the technology behind each case in the simplest way possible. The topics covered are automated checkout, sales forecasting, how to optimise your energy usage, churn rate minimisation, online search recommendation and IoT in-store analysis.

With regards to RPA we take a look at 3 fields, these being tax, HR and finance. We look at where RPA can be applied in each department and delve deeper into a specific case study for each category.